Thursday, January 17, 2008

Mitt Headed Down in S.C.

A big pinch of salt here, please. Straight up, I admit that I did not see W.M. Romney winning Michigan. In our Left Ahead! podcast, I figured John McCain would edge him.

My defining moment was that running debate over the long-gone auto-industry jobs. In a sun-rises-East comment, McCain said that the depressed state's future was in retraining for new, better jobs. He told folks repeatedly "Some of these jobs aren't coming back."

As the movie characters (and many teens) say, "Well, duh!"

Much to my surprise, Romney's pathetic lies won the day there. They must be that desperate to believe in the sweetest song regardless of what they know and see. He said he'd fight for every job, McCain was a pessimist and perhaps a (big government? socialist-style?) bailout would do the trick.

Perhaps we can pause to consider what H.L. Hencken maybe said — No one every went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

I don't know Michiganders that well, not nearly so well as I know South Carolinians. I do believe that any carpetbagger who shows up with such obvious lies down South won't find such gullible voters. They send their own fabulists to the legislature; they don't need to import liars.

South Carolina too needs jobs, not so badly as Michigan, but employment is a big issue there too. Spreading the bovine feces about how they should trust him to get them jobs is less likely to fertilize support as smother it.

Neither state seems to examine Romney's résumé closely. His Massachusetts record should look awful to voters in either place. A little examination shows such "accomplishments" as taxing in new fees while saying those aren't taxes, and delaying infrastructure maintenance to where that is an exorbitantly priced crisis.

In addition, on jobs the hidden message in his venture-capitalist past is that he was successful measured by making large profits for the top rung of the companies' ladders, as well as Bain (his former company). There was never a spare job or high pay and benefits for workers and middle management. Mitt put big bags of money out for only his own class. Pip. Pip. Underlings were cogs in the money machine.

Trust that carpetbagger to take care of the ordinary worker? In a pig's eye!

I'm betting South Carolina is not as delusional and emotionally needy as Michigan. I call it McCain/Huckabee/Romney.